


Rabbit Will Run

by sshysmm



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Angst, F/M, angst is all i know how to do
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 22:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6168898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S4 SPOILERS. Some of this is set after 4x06 with reference to events therein; I'm agnostic about whether they will go down the route I've assumed in this fic, but can't really see how that Thing that Happened could be undone.</p>
<p>As usual, it's just me rewriting bits of the series as if the writers cared a bit more about Deborah Goren's perspective (don't get me wrong, I was thrilled whenever she turned up!).</p>
<p>Deborah's thoughts and pov throughout S4, with an extra scene of my own imagining set after the season finale.</p>
<p>Warnings: mild references to cannibalism and antisemitism. Hate those Dove boys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I still have a prayer

The girl on the train is her father’s daughter through and through.

Deborah searches for a glimpse of Emily Reid, but the sharp, birdlike delicacy that she remembers does not feature in this girl. At the end, Emily’s chin was so often tucked low, letting her glance naturally avoid those she passed; this girl’s square jaw sets itself at an angle and dares the other passengers to meet her eyes. The lids covering them fall low and relaxed as she surveys her surroundings. Absent-mindedly, her fingers fidget around the handles of her satchel, as her father’s once fidgeted around the brim of the bowler hat he held.

Despite the red curls, the schoolgirl’s flushed cheeks and conspiratorial lean towards her companion, she remains the image of Edmund Reid.

_No, not quite_ , Deborah checks this observation, returning her gaze to the paper on her knees. It has been many years since she saw the inspector, and perhaps he has changed since Mathilda’s recovery. But Deborah cannot imagine him without the plaintive curl at the corner of his lips and the soft, sad lines around his eyes.

\--

She lets the girls go their way from the train station, unwilling to follow them directly to her destination. Instead she meanders along the seafront, her fingers pressed tightly on the pages of the broadsheet she’s brought with her.

It’s not that she’d never thought to contact Reid about Isaac’s conviction before. But she held back, hoping; really certain deep down that once he heard he would be there to set matters straight.

Her knuckles ache dully with the pressure she puts through to the paper. The salty wind tries to ruffle the pages and catches the loose curls at her forehead.

\--

He and Isaac had a good friendship. Either could saunter into the life of the other at any given time and the previous conversation would resume effortlessly. In another life Deborah would have longed to listen in, toying with her own glass of vodka, occasionally mocking the ever-spiralling pronunciations of doom or optimism regarding the human race.

She never shared their conversations though.

After Emily, when Reid visited Isaac she would slip away with a shadowy smile if she had been present on his arrival.

She remembered his long eyelashes cast downwards, not quite hiding the way his gaze would follow her as she left with a murmured greeting.

Reid was not the type to maintain regular contact; when he left Whitechapel, Isaac wrote to him occasionally, for a few years, and occasionally Reid would write back. She suspected the conversations were the same piecemeal continuation of the discussion they had been having since they first met; one would simply write when a new development of their philosophy occurred.

When Isaac’s philosophy drifted, he forgot to write. Reid must have found another occupation or something to focus his interest; he did not write either.

Having spared him fewer thoughts as the years went by and the orphanage continued to draw her care and attention, Deborah found herself again mentioning his name, now in increasingly desperate tones. Isaac would regard her from behind his sprawling beard, eyes wild and confused. He knew only his numbers and his work.

But the conviction… she had thought Inspector Drake would write to Reid. Or Reid would see the news. Or Isaac might remember him and thus recall his wits.

She tried his name again, but Isaac was more confused than ever before, pacing the dank cell like an animal.

She did not mean for his name to become a prayer. But over the days that Isaac languished in jail it crept up on her time and again. When the bones of her corset were too tight and air would not enter her lungs; when the city’s summer smog seemed to fill the orphanage and her mind, panic pressing in on her from all angles; as she stood by the window with her eyes closed, trying to gain purchase whilst the world slipped past her, his name rang quietly in the back of her throbbing head. Why did he not come?

The shock of reality hit her one morning as she left Isaac’s cell. Her ears rang with his confused cries and her skirts shook off the crumbs of the bread he had thrown back at her. Her hands trembled as she swept around the corner of the building and stepped into the path of two men carrying a body to the guard’s cart.

It smelt no different to the jails, this recent death, but the anonymity of the grubby linen stopped her in her tracks. The shape of the corpse was human but beyond that you could say nothing about the individual inside the shroud – only that they had been a criminal.

Deborah would not waste another moment: that day she bought the paper with her cousin’s face etched on the front. She saw the red shock of Mathilda Reid’s hair as she rushed to the train station, and she took it for a sign that she had chosen the right day to call on the only friend Isaac might have left.

\--

Approaching the pretty terraced house, Deborah notes immediately how its pastel frontage matches the pale suit of the man standing in front. His companion, all broad smile and nervous laughter, touches his arm imploringly as he looks down at her with an expression far more difficult to read.

The woman stops suddenly, like wild creature startled unawares, a vague whiff of annoyance at being interrupted in a perfectly natural activity.

He turns too, and Deborah inclines her head.

His shoulders are less broad than she remembers; perhaps it is the linen suit, which seems alarmingly like a state of undress compared with the heavy tweeds that were his armour in London. His collar is even unbuttoned, and there is no sign of either spectacles or walking stick. She is taken aback to see no trace of the sadness she associated so keenly with him.

When he sees her his expression opens up, the guarded look he had worn lifting with the breeze from the nearby water. He murmurs her name in wonder and Deborah cannot suppress a slight shiver at the sound of it.

\--

Perhaps they are just old friends. She sits at the table, happy to be still whilst he wanders a small patch of floor. He will not come to London for fear of offending Drake; she has accidentally revealed the daughter’s secret Whitechapel wanderings; the house should be heavy with awkwardness. Instead it is strangely calm as they share the silence, each remembering Isaac Bloom in happier times.

Mathilda is a watchful presence, for her own part. She asks forthright, though elegantly phrased questions over dinner. How did her father know Deborah?

Deborah concentrates on her plate for a second, while she feels Reid’s quick glance pass over her. He met her on a case many years ago – one of the children at her orphanage had run into some trouble. Reid had been good friends with her cousin ever since then.

It’s all true, and Mathilda accepts it. Deborah sees all manner of questions in her eyes though, filed away now for future reference.

She and Reid walk down to the seafront in a dusky blue light. She tries again to persuade him to come back for Isaac; not for her but for the companion he had shared a lasting connection with. His words are implacable even if she hears uncertainty growing in his voice.

When they return, Mathilda’s presence remains as Reid and Deborah exchange stories over a nightcap; she can hear the girl pad up and down the stairs, sees the light pass along on the other side of the closed door. But inside are only two old friends, speaking softly around something that cannot now be named.

\--

The light of dawn is the same inky smear as the beach had been the night before. Deborah is awake too early, accustomed to the orphanage’s operating hours. In this strange home she suddenly feels foolish, ashamed for having sought charity from such a source. She dresses angrily, reminding herself as she does that she came for justice, not charity. The blood rises to her cheeks and she retrieves pen, ink and paper from her belongings, composing herself in the cold light by the window. _Save one life_ … she writes carefully.

She packs her few belongings away, clenching her teeth as she tries to be patient enough for the ink to dry.

The note is left; she knows Mathilda is awake too and desperate to read it, waiting at the foot of the stairs for Deborah to leave. She hopes that Reid tries to explain who Isaac was to her; she hopes the memory works on him and he returns to find the proof that will save the cousin Whitechapel has not yet fully taken from her.

\--

The boys’ cries echo around Whitechapel’s twisted little streets; it does not take long before they are repeated in corner shops and in playgrounds. Deborah sees the news arrive from the upstairs window of the orphanage and wonders only momentarily what the tumult could be. The sound rises shrilly to her ears.

“Bowler’s back!” the children clamour.

Deborah’s skin flushes hot and cold and her knuckles tighten on the windowsill. A second to steady herself and she flies to the door and clatters down the wooden stairs. “Jacob, you mind they come in and wash faces and hands before dinnertime,” she instructs the eldest resident, composing herself momentarily by the door as she realises what it would look like were she to run right out into the street at the news.

She is nevertheless used to the sensation of being watched, and she feels the community’s eyes on her as she walks briskly in the direction the shouts first came from; the direction of Isaac’s old flat. One old woman seems about to say something as Deborah brushes past, but she raises her eyes and chin and gives the babushka a well-practiced look that keeps the words in her throat. Deborah Goren may privately question the decisions she has made, but she will not tolerate such questioning from strangers on street corners.

As she nears the dark alley Isaac lived on, more turn to her. A woman grabs her sleeve, “he says you speak for him!” she utters breathlessly. Deborah does not reply, pushes up the busy stairway and hears a familiar voice attempt words in an unfamiliar tongue.

Reid is in the centre of a mob of people, voices clamouring in accented English, Yiddish and a cocktail of other languages. “She will speak for me,” he adds when there is a brief pause in the chatter of those surrounding him.

He is taller than most of them, his shoulders broadened again by the addition of a thick dark coat. Deborah cannot see his face below the brim of his distinctive hat, his head is bowed down as he tries to identify the leader of the group through the noise.

She raises her voice, reaching out to the tense shoulders of those nearest her, gently urging the crowd apart. Reid looks at her with relief, but also some trepidation. She is shaking with relief herself though, too preoccupied to wonder at the reservation in his expression.

When she tells the crowd that she invited him, the Rabbi Steiner’s familiar voice rings out in challenge. As a community leader she respects him, but the old man has repeatedly asserted Isaac’s guilt. She is exasperated by him and his steady voice, seeding doubt regarding her cousin’s character. She can imagine Isaac pushing Steiner to the ground in a brutal attack just as easily as she can imagine him taking another’s life – but publicly expressing her doubt in Steiner’s word is riskier than challenging a police conviction. The orphanage needs his continued support.

She sees Reid squirm at the implication that he, too, believes Isaac innocent. His jaw works uneasily as Steiner tells his account of the attack. At the mention of God, knowing how Isaac wrestled with his faith, Deborah sees Reid’s eyes drop; despite Steiner’s attempts to put him off the case she notes the detective in him accumulating questions.

Then someone mentions the golem. Undone with frustration at her friends’ willingness to believe in her cousin’s bestial unravelling, Deborah snaps back that it was never proved. Steiner sees Reid’s interest, however, and encourages the salacious details of a wolf-like creature skittering over rooftops and haunting children’s bedsides.

Reid turns to her again. She feels her cheeks flush with heat under his gaze – how much is his disappointment in her imagination? She can barely meet his steady look, thinking how he must feel he has been brought back on false pretences. “This, they believe to have been Bloom?”

Deborah licks her lips, moves her head away to study the floor. “Yes,” she murmurs. All eyes are upon her again. Deborah Goren, who lost her cousin Joshua all those years ago in suspicious circumstances, who had an affair with a married, gentile police officer, who took in children for the police’s safekeeping and was attacked in the night for it, Deborah Goren whose cousin Isaac went mad and turned on his own people, whose young charge Thomas Gower returned to her as a grown man, only to lie drunk each night in a room full of sleeping children. Lonely Deborah Goren, who has enticed her old flame back to London for a hopeless cause, omitting information that she knows confirms her cousin’s guilt.

“They believe,” she adds hoarsely. The energy to raise a defiant chin to the thoughts she knows those around her keep is too much this time. Her fists clench.

The room is finally quiet and Steiner surveys it triumphantly. With a nod to Reid he turns to leave, but not before he lays a paternal hand on her shoulder. “Deborah. These are challenging times for you. I am here for all our brothers and sisters and I will listen to your fears whenever you have need to speak to me. You are always welcome at the synagogue.”

She knows this. She visits it as regularly as anyone else to take the children to services – her faith is her own matter, but the children must grow up within the community and its faith. She has even spoken to Steiner of her fears for Thomas. But Steiner is making a performance of this offer, and it is entirely for Reid’s sake, to show him a picture of an isolated woman too distracted by grief to know truth from falsehood. She wonders whether the Rabbi can feel her quake with anger under that heavy, mock-caring hand.

He leaves with a glance back at Reid, and it is the signal for others to begin returning to wherever they have come from. Deborah stands rooted to the spot, glowering at the patch of floor Steiner previously occupied. She wonders when she will be able to admit to herself that all hope of saving Isaac is lost.

The others leave her space as they go, but momentarily a figure steps in close to her. She acknowledges Reid with a tilt of her head, but does not look at him. She can imagine his expression all too well.

He does not reach out to her as Steiner did, not physically at any rate. But his voice is gentle without being patronising, and his words surprise her. “Tell me where might I see him?”

Deborah finally raises her eyes to his face. The sad little quirk at the corner of his mouth is back, and the soft lines of care around his eyes show deeper again. She has brought him back to this, and he is once more something like the man she remembers. She shivers a little at this realisation, ashamed at the slight thrill of power it gives her.

“He is in the W—Street cells. With the others to be hanged,” her voice catches a bit on the word. “You will find him changed. He is changed. But Edmund – he did not do this!”

He presses his lips together, moves as though to take her hand and then turns the gesture to his hat, removing it abruptly. “I would speak with him in person. Thank you,” he says, the words trailing along uncertainly, as though he wishes to give a reason for his thanks but cannot quite articulate it.

She nods late, at a room now empty as he walks past her and out into the alley.

\--

Isaac is no different. If he remembers Reid’s visit he does not show it. He is vague and Deborah experiences his deep sadness and confusion as though these feelings were waves, physically buffeting her.

“Will you not eat, cousin?” she tries once more, though her hand does not lift the bread from the basket.

Isaac’s eyes drift around the room, struggling to identify her as the source of this question. His writing has been wiped from the wall again recently, and it leaves him more troubled than usual. She wonders whether he senses that time has caught up with him, like a cornered animal; a rabbit in a net.

She remembers the comfort he used to bring her when Joseph could not. And how before that Joseph had taken over as a surrogate parent on their long journey through Europe: cajoling the dour mathematician and chiding his talkative cousin. At these memories a violent burst of longing racks her, a need for home so strong that it could almost be grasped.

Deborah drops the bread back into the basket with a gasp and feels her eyes prick with tears. It is all out of reach now, all but the pain of its absence: there is no home to return to and she feels as though every new home she has made since leaving is being wrested from her. She is upset for Isaac, but she knows that despite her imaginings he is largely oblivious to his situation; she is upset for herself, thinking guiltily of her anger when Joseph was falsely accused. She cannot summon the old fire of rage now.

She kisses Isaac’s crinkled forehead as she leaves him, murmuring good wishes and platitudes that fight past her trembling lips.

\--

That evening, she sits wordlessly in her room, her hands clasped together but her eyes open. She does not look at the religious text that is meant to provide comfort; her eyes see the streets of Kyiv in the last days she was there. Blood and broken glass in the gutters, house fronts defaced and battered, and pale, scared faces gathered in groups, hopeful for safety in numbers. She tries not to think of Isaac’s face in these crowds, plaintive and querulous. When she notices the room has grown dark, with the curtains still open and no candle lit, she realises he must already be in the ground. The justice system has no interest in granting convicted murderers a ceremonial farewell, assuming that there is no redemption to be bargained for in these lost causes.

She untangles her fingers from the empty gesture she has been holding and stands with a long exhalation. Draws the curtains; lights a candle; smooths her skirts. Composed, she emerges to resume care over the orphanage – the children must be in bed before Thomas comes back, reeking of gin and rum.

One approaches her when she steps across the hall to the kitchen. “Miss Goren! A note for you. I read your name on it myself,” the pride in the little girl’s voice elicits a smile.

“Thank you.”

It is Reid’s handwriting. She half expects her note – _save one life_ – to have been returned. But it is just one sheet, written quite quickly, furtively, she thinks.

_Ms Goren,_

_This afternoon I saw your cousin, my friend, Isaac Bloom put into the grave for the murder of Rabbi Retovski. He did not struggle with the noose, and indeed hardly seemed aware of what was happening to him. I cannot speak of his guilt – Inspector Drake is the best of police officers, a good man, and a man I have worked with for many a year, who I trust to do his job with all due care. He had evidence for the case against Bloom, and none to controvert it. Nor could I find such proof to controvert it. Bloom died a guilty man, and we who knew him may struggle to come to terms with this fact, but it must now be so._

_I shall return to Whitechapel to resume my duties at Leman Street under Inspector Drake. I tell you this so that you may hear of it from me direct this time._

_Yours,_

_E. Reid_

The note is frank but reserved. To Deborah’s mind, despite his honesty regarding Isaac’s death, there are missing details: she had read the eloquent, stream-of-consciousness letters he sent Isaac, on subjects that wandered far and wide with enthusiasm. This letter held a lot back.

But she is grateful for it, she supposes. With a sigh, resolving to unravel her feelings about this little scrap of paper at a later date, she stores it away in her room, returning immediately thereafter to the essential work of the orphanage – work she realises she has been drifting away from for too long.

\--

“I am so sorry, Miss Goren. Yet again we are let down by the men who are meant to uphold justice in this land.”

Deborah smiles wanly as she clears away the last lunch items, ushering the children on today’s rota to the washing. Sometimes the younger woman’s earnest attitude makes her laugh, but today it only saddens her to be reminded how similar she once was.

“Miss Costello, do not trouble yourself on my behalf. The matter is closed.”

“But it is not!” she exclaims in her plummy, educated tones. She gestures at the file on the table. “With all this, still they hide the details of the case! There is something more to this, and until I know for certain that it cannot exonerate Isaac Bloom I will demand to know what has been hidden from us!”

Deborah sighs, turns sharply with hands on hips.

Miss Costello is unflappable, but she looks expectantly for agreement.

Deborah remembers events in this same room near a decade past: in a rage at the lack of justice she felt in Joshua’s case she had flown at the man who claimed to uphold the law. Fists flying indiscriminately, no fear for herself, determined not to have to look upon the face of helplessness, who would tell her that there was no other way, no other option; Joshua had to be guilty.

She shakes her head and chuckles without mirth, unsure of whether the reaction is aimed at young Miss Costello, or at her past self.

“He has not visited, has he? Do you think he returns for Isaac or for himself?”

“What matter is that to me?” Deborah says in exasperation, her hands rising from her hips defensively. She turns away, unwilling to share whatever emotions cross her features with Miss Costello.

She wishes she had not let his name carry such hope when she sought to save Isaac. She wishes she were not suddenly so acutely aware of her aloneness, or of his return to London, and the absence of Emily.

For years she had found perfect satisfaction in her work, longed for nothing more than to help these unwanted children in whatever way she could. She feels sick with shame at this newly-won restlessness.

Despite her youth, Miss Costello does not lack for perceptiveness and tact when it is required. She stops pressing. “I will continue my work, Deborah. When I get Retovski’s diaries I will rely on you to assist with the translation – I am hopeful that my contact in Paris will agree to a meeting soon. We will know, you and I, what sorry story took place in these streets, even if we get no help in uncovering it.”

Deborah nods firmly, still not quite turning back to the other woman. “So we will,” she forces the words out with as much optimism as she can manage.

Miss Costello shows herself out and Deborah releases a great sigh. Only part in jest, she curses the name of George Eliot and the tenacious Daniela Deronda who has attached herself to the cruel little story that dragged Isaac Bloom to his death. She is glad though, that Miss Costello has enough heart to take Isaac’s name under concern: she picks up the slack that Deborah leaves these days by not letting herself feel things as strongly as she used.

\--

Soon she discovers that she cannot save Thomas Gower either. Reid stands more helpless than in the case of Joshua, watching his superior warily, uncomfortable with the role, reserving all judgement though doubt is etched on his face. He slinks from Deborah’s furious gaze, and yet she sees that here he believes in Thomas’ guilt. Some of the old fire returns: she follows the police from her orphanage with shouts that echo through the foggy darkness.

When they return him to her, Thomas has lost the semblance of control he had begun to retrieve under her care. War wounds have been torn open by Drake: he has remembered how to blame; who to blame; and he too saw that Reid thought him guilty.

She approaches Steiner again, but the meeting only makes Thomas angry. She is angry that she tried it, but she has no idea what else to offer him now. Not all her children can be helped, not all are willing to accept the help, and Thomas has fought help for so long that she only feels immense weariness at the idea of trying to persuade him to stay in and not to go to the taverns again.

Wolves appear in the night once more.

The floor under the bunk beds is littered with the fevered sketches: pricked ears and pointed teeth; glinting eyes and outlines drawn by shaking hands. She is as uneasy as the children.

Thomas did not return last night.

She checks her stash of bottles – it is intact. She stops every few paces to study the view from the window, hoping to see Thomas stumble out of the late-clinging fog, returning home to her, in need of no more than sleeping off a particularly heavy night.

News travels by crowd in Whitechapel, as it always has. The strange, still morning stirs into noise and action like a sleeping giant. A murmur of background chatter seems to grow, as the ache in Deborah’s tense shoulders grows. The movement of shadowy figures through the dim streets alters slightly: some speed up in anticipation of some sight they have been told of; others speed away, spreading the news.

“A body! A murder on our streets! A new murder!” the excitement rises faster than the fear. This only happens when the death is some person unloved: not a brother or son or trusted tradesman, but someone who is not missed in their own right.

The uneasy knots in Deborah’s muscles cannot be ignored much longer. She walks stiffly out into the damp, biting air and follows those moving towards the event that is on all people’s lips. She breaks into a run without really noticing it and is soon hurtling through the streets, the dank air making her eyes sting and run with salt water. She reaches the police barrier, ten metres deep with curious onlookers.

Not to be put off so easily, she raises her voice, fighting through the throng of people. Some mania has taken over her strength: she pushes past bulky figures, swats aside the grasps of young policemen and reaches for the prone figure on the street.

Thomas is as cold as the air she breathes in in ragged gasps, and her searching hands find no trace of life in his body. The superhuman strength that let her tear through the crowd is fading; she feels as though the cold from Thomas’ body is spreading up her arms.

Someone lifts her bodily away from her charge, and she tries to fight their grip to no effect. Ducking and weaving, she finds herself turned around in Reid’s arms, staring back at Thomas’ body over his shoulder.

She is moved backwards, as though her footsteps through the crowd were reversed in precise order. Her hands take great folds of dark wool up, clenching fists in Reid’s coat as he guides her gently but firmly away. His head lowers and she leans her forehead into his cheek, eyes fixed for as long as she can hold them on the remains of Thomas Gower.

Once they are through the thronging crowd (that parts a little to watch them pass, exchanging new tones of rumour), Reid stops. His hands tighten momentarily where they rest on her waist and back, but then he steps away.

She sways for a moment; the change is disorienting. The embrace of a friend, some comfort or support, this is something she has missed more than she realised since Isaac drifted so far from her.

Deborah smooths her skirts. Reid does not look at her and she does not look at him directly. She searches the ground, trying to pin-point an emotion to articulate. Before she can choose one, Reid steps towards her again, one hand gently taking her elbow and turning her to face the walk back to the orphanage. They go in silence, but he lets his more formal touch linger as they move; she allows herself to be led, sensing that the coldness in her limbs is the creeping effect of shock.

By the time they reach the orphanage she has fought through the cloying mist of confusion in her mind. She takes her arm back, brushes the curls away from her face and composes a sort-of smile to meet his troubled gaze.

“Deborah. I am sorry,” the words weigh more than Thomas Gower. “May I ask some questions of you about Thomas’ last whereabouts?”

“Come up. Share a drink with me,” she tells him by way of agreement.

He nods assent, lips pressed together in his own approximation of a smile. His eyes betray no mirth as he searches her face with concern.

The hat comes off with a sweep of his arm as she collects glasses and a bottle.

She did not share drinks with Thomas, though sometimes she allowed herself a nightcap after ensuring he slept soundly in the bunk bed. She would savour the burning heat of the alcohol, letting it steady a world that grew increasingly unfamiliar around her.

When did she last share a drink with Isaac, she wonders? It had once been so normal that she did not take note; it was taken for granted that he would soon be round again.

Miss Costello is not good with the illegally distilled vodka – she tries occasionally, but Deborah has seen how little she enjoys it. Miss Costello claims that if she tries it often enough, eventually she will learn to drink it.

Reid’s last drink here was not at her table: she remembers their legs entwined under cool sheets; she reached under the bed to retrieve the bottle and then passed a glass across to him. His scarred shoulder was smooth to the touch of her own bare flesh and the small room was lit only by the dim embers of the fireplace.

Roughly, she pours two glasses and sits uneasily across from him. His body language makes the table seem a nuisance: he leans his arms on it, his hands entwined in an attempt to keep them occupied.

Deborah finds the way his thumbs move over one another a powerful distraction. She sits awkwardly, facing half away from him and keeping slightly too still. Her hand lingers on her glass though, skin of her fingers tingling in yearning, her arm pushed out in his direction.

They cannot cross the few inches of table between her hand on the glass and his restless fingers.

She thinks of the conversation with Miss Costello and steels herself. Why should she not wonder? She asks what has kept him from sharing a drink in Isaac’s memory before now.

“Shame.”

Such a shame – disappointment marks her lips; she presses them together tightly. Shame that he could not save Isaac – yes, perhaps that is why he had not visited, but she cannot help thinking that the word means more.

She has felt the eyes of her community on her over the years; their talk has returned again recently and now she has no sympathetic listener in Isaac. She is uneasy talking to Miss Costello about matters that occurred when the other woman was still in school uniform, and she has no idea how to talk about the effects it had on another woman who had hoped to be her friend.

Deborah has visited the granite headstone over the grave of Mrs Emily Reid on cold winter mornings; she has found herself oddly stung by headlines exclaiming salacious news concerning Councillor Cobden and the man in charge at Leman Street; she has felt shame at the jealousy that she does not want to feel.

Shame. It grows in her again now, as she wonders what unspoken things he also applies the shackles of shame to.

Downing the last of the vodka, she stands, retrieves the newest drawings for him. Isaac’s undeserved death is replayed through each of them.

The vodka after the shock of seeing Thomas’ body has made her suddenly tired. As he leaves she calls him back. Maybe it is something of a betrayal to Miss Costello – but then she thinks of the way she inadvertently revealed Mathilda’s wanderings and trusts that ultimately such secrets are not healthy for anyone. When he realises that she once more has information relating to his daughter he closes the gap between them rapidly, standing near and urgently demanding to hear all she knows.

Normally the tone of his voice would make her reluctant to share the information regarding Mathilda’s visits to Miss Costello, but she decides that the case is bigger than Mathilda. The girl is resilient, and if she and Miss Costello have the friendship Deborah imagines they do then it will survive a little of Reid’s protectiveness. Besides, if Deborah is now too tired to scream and rail against the injustices that have taken away so many of the people around her, she has a suspicion that Miss Costello will do the job just as well as she once did.

Her choice made, she tells Reid his daughter has been meeting with Miss Costello – Miss Costello who has an interest in the case files on Isaac Bloom; Mathilda Reid being the girl who memorised details of the Ripper case before the age of ten.

He steps a little closer, expression softening with gratitude. As at the table, she finds herself facing half away from him, unsure of what she wants. His head lowers along with his reassuring words and she finds that she is holding her breath.

Her eyes drop from his face, she cannot look at whatever is there; pity perhaps, or an apology, or indeed anything else. Without really thinking about it, she raises a hand to his chest.

It might be there to stop him coming any closer; he leans into the touch a little.

Once she reached out like this before, to the mess of a man on her doorstep. She had chosen to let him in that night, could not imagine having turned such grief away into the dark streets.

Her fingers caress the fabric of his coat, jacket and waistcoat – rough and cold wool down to the warm silk against his chest. Her little finger toys with the possibility of slipping between the suit jacket and waistcoat.

Reid’s eyes are on her face and she finally glances up; there is no attempt to deny her touch, but his expression is one only of concern.

Her cheeks suddenly feel warm and she cannot bear to think that he is standing there out of pity. Deborah turns away and lifts her chin, reaching for a dignity in loneliness that she does not really feel anymore.

She senses the searching look he gives her, but he says nothing and turns slowly, only breaking the stare when he must. She bites the inside of her lower lip, does not let herself move to watch him go.

It is some minutes before Deborah feels her breathing return to normal and her nervous gaze settle on one thing in the room rather than roving uncertainly around it. She ran out to find Thomas mid-way through the ironing that morning. The orphanage is dark in the muggy grey light – she must arrange the candles, tidy up the teaching room for afternoon classes.

She balls her hands into fists and steels herself to begin the day’s work anew – the left one tingles at a touch severed too quickly and the room feels cold and empty, but she has managed this establishment alone for more than ten years, and she will not accept that anything is different in her now, even if all changes rapidly around her.

She begins collecting Thomas Gower’s small gathering of belongings.

\--

She is never quite alone with Retovski’s diaries. She feels the ghosts of friends and family watch over her shoulder; smiles a little at accounts of song and stories powering a long journey; wipes tears away at the familiar, repeated tragedies in Retovski’s account.

Deborah moves restlessly between the table and the fireplace, seeking warmth when the memories of the coldness of a refugee camp come to her mind. Soon, though, she recoils from the orange flames, imagining wild shapes in the darkness at the back of the fireplace.

Translating these works takes her into a world of intensity; the maintenance of the orphanage is smoothed into force of habit, no chore when it gives her a respite from the clinging despair of Retovski’s writing. She spends the evenings on the translation, no longer tensing at every sound that might preclude Thomas’ return; life takes on a semblance of the normalcy it once had, but only because she dwells on nothing but the translation. The world seems to grow thin around her, but this calm cannot last.

\--

The breathless posse on her doorstep brings the outside world rushing back into her life: Miss Costello is flushed with excitement, triumph, anger – also fear. Bennet Drake is wary, troubled; his eyes haunted by something she cannot discern. Reid seems contained but she reads those sad lines on his face, sees an unease in his shoulders; there is a sort of knowing dread emanating from both him and Drake.

He reads her translation by the light of the window, his voice wavering a little with emotion as he shares the path of the exiles for a brief moment.

The identity of the Whitechapel golem is clear enough. Drake cannot meet Deborah’s eyes, but she squeezes his arm as he leaves – there is something fey about him that she would not encourage by blaming him at this point. Miss Costello follows her lead, with no giddy joy at solving the mystery discernible on her serious, stony expression.

Reid is shifty; she escorts the stunned little group back to the door in silence, walking just behind him. His mind is elsewhere, working on some aspect of the case, or some unseen consequence of the new information. She notes the bruises on his knuckles and Drake’s, wonders what fresh storm Whitechapel is brewing. A feeling like holding one’s breath underwater has been on her since Isaac’s conviction; now it is as though she is about to surface into noise and chaos and the unknown. Reid does not look back as he and the others leave.


	2. One that I cannot control

_Steiner falls to his knees with a grunt; a gobbet of spit lands on his shoulder. The man standing over him gives him another kick for good measure and the old Rabbi curls around the pain, lowering his body to the dusty wooden floor._

_The attacker stumbles backwards, scuffed shoes slithering on the ground. After a pause, he turns and starts running. His arms work at his sides to propel him through grey streets; his fingernails are bitten and dirty, stained with ink and tobacco._

_He runs across red tiles and grey tiles now; the rooftops blur beneath his pace. His arms work to propel him forward – they are on the tiles leading his feet behind, a four-limbed scramble under cold moonlight._

_Retovski is beneath those grubby hands now, pinned and gasping, though there is a pick-axe wedged in his head. He should not be alive, but he watches as his killer lowers his face to the heaving abdomen, tears chunks from him deliberately._

_Blood wells in a dark curly beard, two beetle-bright eyes peer out of a confused face._

\--

Deborah wakes with a start, retching and reaching for the bed-pan.

“Isaac!” she moans, fighting the nausea back down. Her nightdress and sheets are damp with rapidly cooling sweat.

She knows the dream was a lie, but her hands are trembling. She resolves to check that the windows are all correctly pinned, that the door is bolted and all other entrances blocked.

Wrapping a woollen gown around her shoulders and taking up a candle, she glides silently around the hall and kitchen, touching the hard metal of locks and bolts, fingers straying across windowsills and walls. The orphanage is her fortress, she reminds herself. It has withstood invasions and assaults, but still it stands. Still in this dark night it is quiet except for the peaceful breathing of her sleeping children. It must remain a safe haven.

There is a low rattle at one of the windows and she nearly drops the candle in shock. Her mind fills with fearful scenarios so that she cannot concentrate on which room the sound came from.

Eventually it comes again, no more insistent than before – no wolf testing the locks.

Little pebbles on glass, she realises. It is her bedroom window.

She extinguishes the light before moving the curtain as little as possible. A figure, lapped by shadows, stands in the playground. She recognises the silhouette all too easily and considers whether she should just return to her bed and force herself back to sleep, no matter what dreams await her.

Before the thought has fully resolved itself though, she is walking downstairs to the entrance. She slips her shoes on to stop the cold concrete floor from biting into her flesh.

This is not as it was a decade before; she has not shared his secrets or offered to listen without judgement. Whatever brings him to her is more than the lonely heartache she saw written on his face back then.

His eyes are red, face puffy with tears shed recently; one side of his face is an angry welt, glossy new wounds encircling the eye-socket.

This time, she does not reach out, but recoils a little with a gasp. “Edmund! What has happened?”

He shakes his head, the reply drowned somewhere within the grief in his chest. He follows her inside, stumps blindly upstairs and sits below the firm pressure of her hand on his shoulder. His hands find the glass in front of him, but he does not raise it.

She sees every line of his knuckles and fingernails etched out in dark-drying blood.

She waits.

He raises one hand, rubs painfully at the side of his face – though not the side with the bruise. Isaac had told her wonderingly of the way Reid had returned from the dead after being shot; with a fragment of skull missing on the right side of his head, she shivers to think what would have happened had he taken a blow to this same side.

“You told me…” he begins hoarsely, eyes roaming to settle upon the glass he still holds.

She tenses, unwilling to know what words she has spoken impulsively might now be returned to her, some form of blame for whatever has happened.

“You told me that you could not hear my guilt,” he finishes, taking a sip of the vodka at last.

Her mouth folds with misery. She does remember these words; she has never been sure whether the regret she feels at their effect would have prevented her from saying them, had she known what would come next.

“But now I have nowhere else to take it,” his voice has steadied a bit, though he still looks down at the table, his expression thoughtful. “Bennet Drake was killed this night. And I could not stop him from running towards death with open arms.”

His eyes are glassy with tears again in the dim light; she meets his gaze with horror. “The wolf is unleashed. We have lost all.”

It is a moment before she notices splinters from the table pricking her fingers where she grips it. Deborah takes a second glass and pours herself a drink too. They sit together silently in the dark room.

He rubs his face again with a hand, punishing the skin of his cheek and forehead with palm and fingers; water wells from his tightly pressed eyelids.

Deborah moves quietly around the table to sit next to him. With both hands she takes his, lowering it to the table. He turns slowly to her, shoulders slumped and expression glum, a lack of hope or fight that she has never seen in him before.

“He deserved better than this,” he tells her.

He is thinking of Drake; she thinks of Joshua; Isaac; Thomas; the other bodies left defiled by Nathaniel Dove’s twisted rampages.

“You will catch him,” she offers. “He and his brother will face justice.”

Reid’s eyes drop; he looks wistfully at the table. “Dove knows… he has information he will use against us. He has the time now; whilst we chase shadows and phantoms…”

She listens to his disjointed sentences trail off. He stares at his bloodied hand, held loosely between her pale, cold fingers, and he shudders bodily.

Deborah watches him wrestle with another sentence, struggling to form the words he needs. “Tell me, Edmund,” she encourages quietly.

He looks stricken. “I cannot,” he whispers, his gaze now fixed firmly on her face. His breathing is rapid, she sees his chest rise and fall; his mouth is open and eyes wide in a gasp of panic.

As though trying to coax one of the children at breakfast, or over a book, she smiles patiently – though trepidation and sadness colour the expression. She releases his hand and gently pries the bowler hat from his head, setting it on the table. Her fingers smooth the hair back from his sweaty forehead, trace smoothly down his temples and around the edge of the bruised eye and the healthy one; carefully, she lets the gesture continue back into the shorter hair above his ears, her left hand quaking a little around the scar there. Their journey completed, her hands return to rest in her lap; his expression has changed little, but the anxiousness has perhaps faded somewhat.

He lets out the breath she had not noticed he had been holding, goes to raise his hand to her face in turn. The gesture is not completed, however; he sees the blood on his skin again and lowers it to his own lap. “You have always…” he murmurs, looking down again. “Always held me to a higher standard. You would not let the easy evidence be true: you did not settle for young Thomas Gower’s guilt and you made me realise that I should not either. Once more with Joshua Bloom, you challenged my complacency.”

She tucks her lips together and looks down too, reaching out to squeeze his arm.

“You made me return to Emily…to my wife. You made me see that if I could not tell her what I told you then I could never have claimed that I had even tried to salvage…to salvage us.” He finally looks up, cheeks reddening with the emotion choking his voice. “I did not meet your expectations: I was not strong enough to take blame then, and I was not strong enough to make Bennet see what you made me see about your cousin Isaac. You came to me after all those years, looking for a man who upholds justice and sees the right thing done. Deborah, I am not that man,” his expression is earnest now; seeking her response even as he hopes she says nothing.

She cannot speak while he looks at her like this, steels herself, thinking back, trying to imagine what she felt when she shouted out in that courtroom as Thomas stood there trembling in the dock. What did she feel when she railed at Reid’s failure to believe in Joshua, and again when she could no longer hear things meant for another woman’s ears?

“Forgive me, Edmund,” she licks her lips to speak. “I have never placed you on a pedestal. I saw hope – hope that you would try and do the right thing, that you wanted to achieve whatever was right.”

He is now the silent one again, looks down at his lap, puzzling. His tears have dried and he has taken her hand in his as he thinks. “Then are intentions truly all that matter? Does it matter, this…desire to do what is right?”

“It matters,” she agrees, hesitatingly. There is something he is holding onto still, something she does not think she wants to hear. She feels a sudden strange rush of vertigo, realising that this is akin to the way he and Isaac would talk.

It is not how they would sit together though; his hand tightens its warm grip on hers and he turns his head, leaning speculatively towards her.

She raises her free hand to his mouth, stopping the kiss he intends. She caresses his cheek, smiles reassurance. “It does matter, but it cannot be all.”

He blinks sadly, leaning into her touch. With a sigh he tells her: “Dove will drag my name through the streets. He will defile the memory of Bennet Drake. My daughter will be told that I am nought but a cold-blooded murderer. My deeds will be twisted, turned from all good intent and retold as a reign of terror.”

Deborah realises how cold the room is with the fire low. She would like to take her hand back, return to bed, return to sleep to wake fresh in the morning, finding that all this is nothing but a continuation of the nightmare she had been having. Instead, she must respond. “How could that be so?” she murmurs.

He turns away from her touch so that she does not have to break the contact. He lifts both hands back onto the table and looks at them. “Enough of it is true, I suppose.”

She makes a quiet sound that she hopes sounds incredulous. “That mob. The men who attacked Thomas: that was a reign of terror. The man who prowls these streets tonight, the men who tried to frame my cousin: they are cold-blooded murderers. Prejudice, hatred, self-serving cruelty…this is what you have fought, Edmund. You will defeat it once more now.”

He smiles ruefully and looks up. “You say that you do not hold me to a high standard, Ms Goren?”

She opens her mouth to explain, but his helpless little chuckle stops her. “No, I apologise. Yet, there is one thing that I could not tell my Mathilda and I must find a way to tell you. If she shall discover the truth of my past I would have it come from a friend, one who can offer comfort with ill news.”

Isaac always knew she was too ready to help others before herself. He chided her kindly and listened without judgement, and he had supported her whenever she gave too much of herself away with no return. She wishes Isaac were here to find a response to Reid’s confession: she is speechless with horror at what he goes on to tell her about the death of Michael Buckley, Mathilda’s keeper.

They both stare at his hands in silence when he finishes speaking. She could hear the traces of a resonant fury in his voice, indignant that another man had kept his child from him – had told her that Reid had been all that was cruel in her life before. No matter how well she was cared for, she was kept from him, her father, her mind encouraged to think of him as a wicked king, a fearful figure cast as former captor by the present captor.

Deborah can imagine the violence those large hands are capable of all too easily. She has never wanted for a child of her own – the orphanage is full of more joy and sadness than one life alone could encapsulate – but she wonders what she would feel, for instance, if she met Thomas Gower’s army sergeants. Or if she came unawares upon Nathaniel Dove.

She had swung at the gang boss who attacked Reid on the night the orphanage was invaded by him and his feral mockeries of children. She cannot think what she felt, or what she wanted; even through the rushing adrenaline she knew her strength was not comparable to that of this wiry man, but had she possessed the strength would she have wished for a more decisive blow?

She shivers and wraps her gown around herself more tightly. “How can I say this to her? How can I tell the girl this?”

Reid studies her, a note of admiration in his eyes. Reconciled to the blood on his hands, he raises a hand and gently sweeps her loose hair back from her face. The hand comes to rest on the small of her back – it is surprisingly warm in the cold room. “She is strong. She will perhaps understand how it could happen, even if she cannot forgive it.”

Deborah shakes her head, hunched over her folded arms. She stares ahead into middle distance. “No, and have her hear this from the woman who helped drive her mother to madness? No, Edmund. I cannot. She will hear it from Miss Costello. That is better.”

He nods, disappointed but content to let her decide. She lets him bring her closer, wrapping his arms around her cold body. She tucks her head under his chin, feeling her curls catch in the stubble on his neck. Whatever he has done, she wants this moment; just to be held in an engulfing embrace, to feel the chill of the dark night kept at bay.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles are a reference to the Iron & Wine song Rabbit Will Run (from the album Kiss Each Other Clean).


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